It feels like there should be some kind of tool analogous to valgrind/ASAN/TSAN/UBSAN for code that is just run on all the images of any kind of paper before it is published to check for these kinds of things. Some of them just seem to be honest mistakes like linking the same image in two different places and this would fix that so nobody needs to bother checking for it in the future. It would also have the byproduct of catching all the malicious image doctoring that some people do which is just horrific for science in general.
Readit Newslightsighter commented on The blogger who spotted problems in Dana-Farber cancer papers nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rntn
lightsighter commented on The death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated understandingai.org/p/the... · Posted by u/tim_sw
What are you talking about? Humans are shockingly good drivers. It is a average of ~80,000,000 miles, or ~5,000 years of regular driving between fatalitys and that includes the motorcyclists, drunks, and people who do not wear their seatbelts who account for ~70% of all deaths if I recall correctly. If you are a average driver who does not drive drunk and who wears your seatbelt and you started driving when agriculture was invented you would not be expected to have gotten into a fatal accident yet.
Anybody who says humans are bad drivers is almost certainly underestimating the difficulty of replacing humans by a factor of 1000x.
We can compare against another mode of human-controlled transportation. There are 1.37 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles driving in the US [1]. In comparison, there are ~0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles flying. Converting into the same units, there are 137 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles driving. So you are 685X more likely to die while driving/riding in a car than flying. That's almost three orders of magnitude worse! Humans are pretty terrible drivers in comparison to how good we are at flying.
[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
>They think they can regulate all that? Come and take it from us.
Sorry, you can't buy GPUs any more.
And there you go, it's over for open source AI. Our supplies will dwindle and we'll be far behind the 'licensed and regulated' data centers that are allowed these 'munitions'.
To be fair, it's never been easier to get access to thousands of GPUs in the cloud. It might be expensive, but that is an entirely different kind of barrier. Just a decade ago, it used to be that the only way to get access to thousands of GPUs was to get access to a supercomputer at a national lab. Now anybody with enough money can rent thousands of GPUs (with good interconnects too!) in the cloud. There's certainly a limitation on it from a money perspective, but access to the computational resources themselves is not a problem.
lightsighter commented on Ask HN: What would it take for an AI to convince us it is conscious? · Posted by u/interstice
Alright, here's an idea: consciousness is spectrum that occurs when a system develops an automatic self-correcting mechanism for interacting with the external physical universe. In some sense all animals (including humans) wandering on this planet are conscious, because we all learn to build our actions around interactions with the external physical universe, e.g., we learn how to walk/swim/fly under the force of gravity without falling/crashing, we learn that the square peg fits in the square hole and not in the round hole, etc. The feedback from these interactions allows us to automatically adjust our future actions without external help. In this sense we learn what works, aka. what is "true" (at least under the laws of this universe). Some animals happen to have "higher" consciousness in that they interact with the universe in more sophisticated ways, learning "deeper" truths, but all animals possess some degree of consciousness under this definition (my cat is certainly consciousness, she has learned how to manipulate the external world, especially me, perfectly at this point). Consciousness is a matter of degrees, not a binary property that one can satisfy.
This definition also has the nice property of showing why current LLMs don't fit on the spectrum. They don't have any concept of learning what is true and automatically self-correcting. They will happily tell us things that are obviously not true, e.g., the square peg fits in the round hole, and then insist that they are right, when a basic physics experiment will disprove their assertions. Interestingly though, things like linear feedback control systems like we might find in an elevator do possess some degree of consciousness: they interact with the physical world, identify the true position of the elevator, move it where they want, and self-correct when necessary. They might be primitive, but I for one believe that they are certainly "conscious" at some level, and definitely more than LLMs. :)
Almost certainly this definition is incomplete and flawed in many aspects, but I think it's at least self-consistent.
lightsighter commented on Half of Americans anticipate a U.S. civil war soon science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/droptablemain
Very interesting!
Generally, in the country in the Europe I've lived in, the people who want to secede are those who don't want to see their taxes go to the country's lazy and scammy region (almost all countries have one).
Ironically, in the US, most of the people that want to secede are the ones in states receiving more taxes than they pay.
lightsighter commented on Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone vice.com/en/article/dypxp... · Posted by u/ciprian_craciun
My honest opinion is that I think the whole Qualcomm thing is a canard. What I think is really going on is that after three years the batteries are at death's door. Too many people will just replace/trash the phone rather than know to replace the battery.
I'm still using a Pixel 2, now 4.5 years after I got it (lack of security is easy: don't put or do anything I care about on the phone, turn off the power when having sensitive conversations nearby). It can go two days between charging.
lightsighter commented on Gravitational waves should permanently distort space-time quantamagazine.org/gravit... · Posted by u/theafh
> Importantly, gravitational waves are not waves of Newtonian gravity. Gravitational waves do not "push and pull" along the direction of propagation. They stretch and compress space along axes perpendicular to the direction of propagation.
This may be, likely is, a stupid question, but how do you measure this if space itself is stretched or compressed? Won't any yardstick lying in that space also be stretched or compressed? Or is it a matter of this distortion of space changing geodesics through it so light following a straight line will end up in a different place? It seems that LIGO uses interferometry to measure a change in distance between two points, though, and I don't understand how that can be measured if space is stretched, only if space is added. Perhaps that is the answer right there: when space is stretched dimensionless particles traveling through that space are not stretched, because they are dimensionless. Or perhaps better, objects in space stretch, but their momentum vectors don't stretch.
The clever thing about interferometers is that they're actually measuring space and time in two different dimensions concurrently and then looking for changes in the interference pattern between light moving along each of the dimensions. Simplistically, imagine a gravitational wave propagating along one dimension of the interferometer (realistically gravitational waves will never be perfectly aligned with any direction of the interferometer). Space will be distorted in that dimension but not the other and we can notice the change in the resulting interference pattern. In practice, gravitational waves will come from all sorts of weird angles, but they will distort each of the two dimensions differently and allow us to figure what direction they were propagating by the interference pattern that's observed.
Vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus to others, with or without mutations. The idea that vaccinated people are ‘safe to be around’ is an outdated fantasy.
I never said it stopped all transmission, but it will stop a large fraction of it. We're playing games of probability. Anybody that deals in absolutes is living in a fantasy world.
From NEJM Israeli study on Pfizer:
"In our study, definite or probable cases of myocarditis among persons between the ages of 16 and 19 years within 21 days after the second vaccine dose occurred in approximately 1 of 6637 male recipients and in 1 of 99,853 female recipients."
Moderna shot is worse then for boys. What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109730?query=re...
> What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
Because they still contribute to chain of transmission to the most vulnerable members of society, likely in a disproportional way since younger members of society tend to socialize more. Fighting a virus is a collective action. In order to stop transmission to the vulnerable members, you need to cut edges along all paths through the graph. Furthermore, additional spread, even among healthy people with no side effects, increases the probability of mutations that lead to more fit variants capable of causing even more sickness and death.
who is RMS?
Richard M Stallman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman